James Agee:

An Inventory of His Collection at the Harry Ransom Center

James Agee began writing short stories
and poems in high school and by the time he graduated from Harvard he was able to launch
a fully-fledged writing career which included novels and screenplays. This collection
contains a large and diverse sampling of his works including novels, articles and
reviews, several posthumously published collections, and a small amount of
correspondence.

James Rufus Agee was born on November 17, 1909, in Knoxville, Tennessee, the first of
two children. His father, Hugh James Agee, was from rugged farming stock in the
mountainous backwoods of Tennessee while Laura Tyler, his mother, had a more educated
and artistic background. Her mother, Agee's grandmother, was among the first women to
graduate from the University of Michigan. Throughout his life Agee was very aware of the
contradictions of this twofold heritage. His mother was a devout Episcopalian and
sheltered Agee whereas his father introduced adventure and pleasures such as going to
the movies and taking his son to the pubs afterward. As a result, Agee was both timid
and daring as a child. The death of Agee's father in an automobile accident in May 1916
was a major turning point in his life.

After vacationing near Sewanee, Tennessee, in the summer of 1918, Agee's mother decided
to relocate there and enrolled her son at Saint Andrew's, an Episcopalian boarding
school, which he attended from 1919 to 1924. Her reasoning was that it would allow him
to be more in the company of men and would provide the religious training and education
she felt was important. It had the effect, however, of causing Agee to feel not only cut
off from the companionship of his father, but now from his mother as well. It was at
Saint Andrew's that Agee formed the close ties with Father James Herold Flye that were
to last a lifetime. Agee attended Knoxville High School for the 1924-1925 school year
and after a trip to Europe with Father Flye in the summer of 1925, he enrolled at
Phillips Exeter Academy in Exeter, New Hampshire, where his interest in writing first
began. Among his writings for the Exeter
Monthly were twelve short stories, nine poems, several articles and reviews,
and four plays.

Agee attended Harvard from 1928 to 1932 where he became increasingly committed to a
literary career. He began to write poems, short stories, and articles for the Harvard
Lampoon, the Crimson, and the Harvard Advocate. He first joined the editorial board in 1919 as an
associate editor of the Advocate, and
by 1921, became editor-in-chief. His parody of Time in the March 1921 issue of the Advocate was highly acclaimed. In fact, it was this article on Time which attracted Henry Luce, and
resulted in an offer to write for Fortune.
He accepted, thinking his journalistic career would be brief, but it lasted for
more than fifteen years. Agee was constantly in despair that he may have sacrificed his
own creative efforts for the demands a journalistic style imposed. However, his book of
poetry, Permit Me Voyage, was published
in 1934 as part of the Yale Series of Younger Poets.

In 1936, on assignment for Fortune,
Agee and photographer Walker Evans went to Alabama to do a story on tenant
farmers. By the time the project was finished three years later Agee had enough material
for a book, which was published in 1941 as Let
Us Now Praise Famous Men. Considered a failure at that time, it is now
generally considered an original masterpiece. While working on Famous Men, Agee began reviewing books for Time in 1938, which soon expanded to films,
and in 1941 he began a weekly column on film for The Nation, both projects ending in 1948. His most well
known piece of criticism was "Comedy's
Greatest Era," published in 1949 in Life magazine, in which Agee extolled the era of silent movies. After 1948,
Agee wrote principally film scripts and fiction. He wrote several screenplays and one
full-length original script, Noa-Noa,
based upon the journals of Paul Gauguin, which was never produced. Most well known is
his work on The African Queen, which he
wrote in collaboration with John Huston.

Agee's autobiographical novel, The Morning
Watch (1951), is a tale about a young boy's experiences on a Good Friday
morning while attending a boarding school, reminiscent of his own Good Friday
activities. In A Death in the Family
(1957), also autobiographical, Agee was finally able to write about the
experience of a father's death and the reactions of various family members. Agee
suffered a series of heart attacks beginning in 1951 and did not complete the novel for
publication before his death. He began work on the screenplay, A Tanglewood Story, in
1954 but was unable to finish it, and several other projects he had begun, before his
death from a heart attack on May 16, 1955. He was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer
Prize for fiction in 1957 for A Death in the
Family.

The James Agee Collection contains 14 boxes of primarily manuscripts, with a slight
amount of correspondence, ranging in date from 1928 to1988, with the bulk covering the
period before his death in 1955. The later dates reflect posthumous collections of his
works. The material is arranged in three series: I. Works, 1928-1968 (10 boxes), II.
Correspondence, 1930-1955 (1 box), and III. Miscellaneous, 1936-1988 (3 boxes). Within
each series the material is arranged alphabetically by title or author. This collection
was previously accessible only through a card catalog, but has been re-cataloged as part
of a retrospective conversion project.

The Works series consists of holographs, typescripts and carbon copy typescripts of
books, articles, plays, poems, reviews, stories, and screenplays. Included are
holographs and typescripts of Agee's novels, A
Death in the Family (published posthumously in 1957), Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941), written with Walker
Evans, and his shorter novel, The Morning Watch
(1950). Also present are typescripts of a collection of his short prose entitled
Collected Short Prose of James Agee
(1969), edited by Robert Fitzgerald.

His poetry is represented as well with typescripts of Collected Poems of James Agee (1968), edited by Robert
Fitzgerald, a proof copy of Permit Me Voyage
and Other Poems (1934), and typescripts of several poems. Holographs,
typescripts, and carbon copy typescripts of several of Agee's screenplays are also in
this collection, such as The African Queen, "The Blue Hotel," Magia Verde, Night of the Hunter, Noa-Noa, Scientists and Tramps, A Tanglewood Story, The
Touch of Nutmeg, and "Undirectable
Director." In addition, there are typescripts of a television play, Mr. Lincoln, and a holograph draft of
The Quiet One, a commentary for a
documentary film. Numerous reviews of books and films written for Time and The
Nation are grouped together under the heading "Reviews."

The Correspondence series consists mainly of letters relating to Agee's work. Outgoing
letters include correspondence to director David Bradley regarding his screenplay for
Noa-Noa; 47 letters to Walker Evans,
photographer and co-author of Let Us Now Praise
Famous Men; and letters to Archibald MacLeish ( Fortune) and T.S. Matthews ( Time). Also present are 57 handwritten personal letters,
along with 22 fragments of letters, from Agee to Patricia Scallon, dating from 1951.
Incoming correspondence includes a contract from Gregory Associates, Inc. for writing
the screenplay, Night of the Hunter,
and letters from Margaret Marshall of The Nation. Correspondents are indexed at the end of this inventory.

The Miscellaneous series contains correspondence from Agee; a book review by Harvey
Breit; articles by George Barbarow on the cinema and Roberto Rossellini, and by John
MacDonald on "The State of the
Movies"; typescripts of John Collier's The Touch of Nutmeg; two versions of a play by Tad Mosel based on the Agee
novel, A Death in the Family; two
copies of a screenplay, All the Way Home,
also based on A Death in the Family,
by Philip Reisman, Jr.; typed comments on A Death in the Family by Rebeccas O’Conner Moulder along
with photographs, clippings, and theater program for a theatrical production of All the Way Home; a thesis on Agee by Joan
Shelley Rubin, and an address by Robert Fitzgerald given at the dedication banquet of
the James Agee Memorial Library at Saint Andrew's School, as well as letters to Robert
Fitzgerald regarding publication of his book on Agee from Houghton Mifflin Company.
Included also is a bound galley proof of My
Brother's Keeper: James Joyce's Early Years by Stanislaus Joyce; and
correspondence from and concerning Laura Tyler Wright, Agee's mother.

Elsewhere in the Center are two Vertical File folders which contain reviews of Agee's
books and articles about his life. In the Walker Evans collection in the Photography
Collection are 70 published and 100 unpublished documentary portraits, landscapes, and
other images made in Alabama in 1936 for Agee’s collaboration with Evans on the book
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. The
Art Collection houses thirteen sketches by Agee.

Index entries followed by the notation (from Agee) indicate people to whom Agee wrote.
Box and folder numbers followed by a number in parenthesis indicate the number of items
by (or to) that person. No parenthetical notation indicates there is just one item. So
in the example

Matthews, T. S. (Thomas Stanley), 1901- --11.13 (2) (1 from Agee), 12.3 (2) there are two
items in box 11, folder 13, one from Agee and one from Matthews; and two items from
Matthews in box 12, folder 3.